In early February, Holy Trinity Reformed Church of Lviv, Ukraine was planning for the rest of the year. The congregation, about fifty-strong, was launching its college ministry and developing its mercy outreach.
As the month progressed, new challenges were looming. A week before the Russian invasion, Holy Trinity formed a crisis committee and began looking at questions of housing, transportation and food.
Rev. Heero Hacquebord is the church’s pastor. Born in South Africa, he has helped found Holy Trinity. After Russian tanks poured over the border and Russian missiles slammed into cities, emergency plans supplanted regular plans, and Holy Trinity has housed over 200 refugees, using members’ homes, the church’s office space, and a rented apartment. Many refugees have been there since the beginning of the invasion.
Seven are staying in Hacquebord’s apartment alone. He called over Zoom last Friday, his church office moved to a spare room in his home.
Lviv has not seen attacks like in Kyiv, Mariupol or Kharkiv. A nearby oil depot, airport and military base were destroyed, but the city stands, unshelled.
Refugees started arriving before Vladimir Putin’s forces attacked. The office space, now managed by a man from a sister congregation in Kharkiv, holds about a dozen people. A seminary student runs the rented apartment which can house fifteen people at a time for three-day stays.
“You just want to take care of their basic needs: give them food, give them a shower, make sure they’re clothed and have a bed,” he said. “That is just a great comfort for them to have those basic things taken care of.”
Many of those fleeing belong to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Ukraine, Holy Trinity’s denomination, but others found Holy Trinity out of necessity, through friends of friends.
Their stories are harrowing. Most refugees are women and children; the husbands and father have stayed behind to fight.
Two young mothers, both in their twenties, came with three children between the two of them from Severodonetsk.
When attacks forced the families out of their apartment buildings, the two mothers took their kids to shelter in the unfinished basement of a nearby school, with 1,500 others. Electricity was scarce, and the young women had to leave the basement to scavenge for food.
“They did this while the city was being bombed,” Hacquebord said.
Missiles flying overhead toward another target sound different from those descending toward you, they told him, and the pair learned to hear the difference.
Even with this caution, one missile exploded just ten meters from where they were standing.
After Ukrainian soldiers entered the basement, Russian troops began attacking the building. The women then took their children, all under the age of eight, from the basement and fled their hometowns, fighting into buses and onto trains and away from death.
Russian troops are harassing those fleeing the east by bus, stopping them at checkpoints and not allowing them to leave until after nightfall, the pastor said. This way, the buses will face oncoming Ukrainian troops in the dark, raising the risk Ukranian soldiers will mistake their neighbors for invaders.
There are other humiliations. One family has a sister, a town official, who stayed back east, in the area of Berdyansk. Russian soldiers came to her house to intimidate her and later returned to break open the locked doors of the family who fled. The doors to this home remain open, and the family does not know what will be left for them.
Hacquebord is remarkably composed about it all. The church and the refugees gather for worship on Sundays and for dinner and Bible studies on Wednesdays and Fridays. He takes walks between preparing sermons and the air raid sirens to clear his head. They read the Psalms together.
The minister said that he tells his congregants not to hate the Russians; that sin dwells in Ukrainian hearts too. But make no mistake, the war Ukraine fights is just.
While humanitarian aid is important and good, military aid is needed to turn back the Russian forces.
“There’s fear in the West to make Putin, to make Russia mad, and because of that, the war drags on,” he said.
At this point, he paused and, collecting himself, continued on. Some of his congregants are fighting, he said.
“It’s not okay. It’s not okay to invade another country like this and just murder people,” Hacquebord said.
Despite the weeks of air raid sirens and crisis response, it’s hard to believe this is happening.
He asked for those to pray for people’s safety, for wisdom on how to use very limited time and materials to aid so many needs, for Ukraine to emerge stronger from this invasion, for God to build the Church.
Above all, for this war to end.
Hacquebord said the church is deeply grateful for prayers and material support. Those interested in supporting Holy Trinity Reformed Church of Lviv’s work of supporting refugees can do so at mtw.org/ukraine-crisis.
Juliana Knot graduated from Calvin in 2021 with a degree in philosophy, mathematics, and German. She covers Southwest Michigan business and agriculture as a reporter for the Herald-Palladium.
1 Comment
Submit a Comment
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Thank you for connecting with this Calvin alumnus and sharing his story with your community of readers.